


The Kids We Were (And The Ways We Loved)

by IronicAppreciation



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Derry (Stephen King) is Terrible, F/M, Gay Stan, Gen, M/M, Multi, New Year's Kiss, New Years, The Turtle (IT) CAN Help Us, Traditions, because I can haha, follows book canon (sort of), get fucked Stephen King, i wrote this two years ago and found it on my notes last week, lesbian bev, lots of platonic kissing, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronicAppreciation/pseuds/IronicAppreciation
Summary: “Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon/Ben Hanscom/Eddie Kaspbrak/Beverly Marsh/Richie Tozier/Stanley Uris, Everyone/Everyone, Implied Richie Tozier/Eddie Kaspbrak - Relationship, Platonic OT7 - Relationship, QPFs, these kids just really love each other okay
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25





	The Kids We Were (And The Ways We Loved)

There's a small field, a couple of miles along the riverbend, where the patches of trees make an odd little clearing in a ditty of dense woodland. The grass is taller here; it bristles gently and tickles your knees when there's wind, and the air always holds the mild fragrance of crisp, nearby waters cocktailed with a slight trace of dank runoff rancidity from the sewage upstream. Here, where knots of roots meet and conglomerate and make it so that no more vegetation can grow over their tangled appendages, and where millions of mosquitos and the occasional dragonfly flutter over even during the wintertime, here is where Stanley Uris sliced open his palm with a stray shard of a coke bottle seven years ago, and proceeded to do the same for each of his six friends, the lot of them arranged wordlessly in a small circle, so young then that the grass almost reached over their heads when they sat down in it.

Now, it just barely brushes past Bill Denbrough's chin.

Bill, who is now 17, eighteen in a month, on the cusp of being a legal adult, and has acceptance letters from universities piled up on his desk, still yet to be filtered because going through them and choosing a college seems like too much of an ultimatum, too grown up a task.

He lives as far away from Maine as physically possible, on a coastline-city in Washington, where snow is an all but foreign concept altogether, but here he is, shivering in the cardigan he slipped on in his haste because he had foolishly forgotten how cold winters in Derry were, and he thinks to himself that he might as well be eleven again, his bike strewn in the grass and his stomach itchy from bug bites and earth burns, staring up at the sun with his bare feet wading in the creek.

Stan, whose curls have grown in length to fall almost obstructively over his eyes, laughs at his attire, remarking that he's going to freeze, and while Bill may have told him to 'eat my entire ass, Jewfro' no more than an hour ago, he finds himself caught in eternal gratitude now as his friend drapes a spare coat over his shoulders, informing him once more that he is a complete and utter fool.

Bill does not stutter when he thanks him, a little less gracious and a little more snarky than he intends to be. His blue-grey eyes smile up at his friend, though, as he snaps that maybe he should've brought a menorah instead of a jacket. "Fire's a lot warmer than nylon, Stan."

To his left sits Richie Tozier, his gloved fingers grazing through the frost feathered blades of grass, a whitish, fuzzy-looking carpet of ice clinging to green stems like drops of dew, emitting a satisfying crunch when crumbling into his hands. He has traded in his horrifically thick lenses with their inhumanly magnifying frames for a sleeker pair of glasses, horn rimmed and held neatly on his nose, devoid of any attempts at crude scotchtape repair. He's chatting up Bev, whose hair flares out of her beanie and looks sparse against the dark sky above, setting it ablaze like it's breathing fire. Her hands are splayed out beneath her, and when she laughs, loud snorts escape with her foggy breath just as they did when she was a girl.

She's moved to Portland, Oregon now, away from Derry and away from her father, but not away from her friends. Not now; not ever.

Ben Hanscom, who started attending NYU when he was 16, lies on the snowy earth a few feet away from the former love of his life, arms and legs outstretched, making snow angels like he hasn't done since he was 6. His cheeks are red and his face puffed up, and he's blushing like crazy, but for once, Beverly Marsh is not the cause, because, as it turns out, young Benjamin has proven to be quite the heartthrob under all those shrouded layers of fat that he's sloughed away, and he's got a loving girlfriend back home, who's majoring at his school in microbiology.

Still, here he is in Derry, back in the very same spot where he got that scar that Beatrice only just noticed while bidding him goodbye at the airport last night, back with his six childhood chums, as the year gradually comes to a close, December 31, 1965 ticking away minute by minute. 

It was Bill's idea in the first place, but they all unanimously agreed that it would be slanderous to begin their years anywhere but sprawled upon the shitty slopes off the Derry Barrens.

Since 1958, not one dreary December night has gone by that the seven of them haven't met up right here, where, when the breeze whistles just right and you hold your breath and are utterly silent, you can hear mellow winds wavering over the running waters for miles and miles, humming brazenly and trilling every so often, to see off the old year and welcome in the new. It just feels right, to them, to start and end each year at home, even if the in-betweens are few and far apart, spent so distantly, their own familiar faces seem to grow more and more unrecognizable with every passing second.

Mike wrestles over the withering mounds of snow, his scarf flapping against the increasing bouts of wind, with seven beer coolers clasped between his fingers, and even though his mouth is obscured by the bundles of clothing wrapped snugly around him, Ben is sure that everyone here can clearly envision his grin hiding underneath the extraneous layers.

"Jay-sus, Mikey," Richie sits straighter, pushing up his glasses (which need really no adjustment) out of habit, his Voice nasally and weathered, "any moar coats on yo' damn skinny bawdy and i'da thought Edster's good ole' lady took'it ahpon 'erself ta dress-ya'." He reassumes his regular inflection, nudging Beverly and saying, not quite discreetly, "the exact opposite of what she did to me last night."

Eddie, who is (unfavorably to this argument) indubitably wearing more excessively large overcoats than all the rest of them combined, lets out a loud groan, his breath pooling in front of him in spite of the turtleneck that seems precariously close to strangling him, worn taut around his throat and looking seconds away from cutting off his windpipe. He inquires dejectedly whether "the harassment will ever end?", in response to which Richie leans over, shimmying an arm around his narrow shoulders and sloppily smooching his cheek, positively beaming as he shakes his head, "nope!"

Bill chuckles, rolling onto his stomach and placing his chin in his palms, trembling at the touch of the cold ground beneath him, the sludge of snow coming in contact with his exposed flesh as his shirt rides steadily up his skinny waist.

"What was that Voice even supposed to be?" He knows full well that it's the Irish cop, but he'd die before admitting to Richie that his impressions are improving, little by little. God knows he doesn't need his ego inflated further.

Mike, tuning out Rich's indignant yelps about 'bitter betrayal!' and the 'appalling lack of appreciation his so-called friends adorn for his talent!', hands the first of the beers to Ben, who sits up to accept it, shaking snow from his hair even as soft flakes settle upon his eyelashes. "Your year okay, man?" Mike asks his prone form, taking a seat, as well as a drink for himself, and dumping the rest of the bottles in the icy amalgamation of their haphazard ellipse, "college going good?"

"College's going great," Ben smiles, brightly and boldly, his words slurred by the cold, "shit, dude, college is fantastic. I've got a girl and a room all to myself since my roommate dropped out, and a clean slate somewhere in the big apple where I ain't Benny Big Butt or Tits or Haystack."

"Hey, Haystack!"

Mike and Ben chuckle in turn as Richie calls out, Stanley muttering irritably that if he gets any louder, all of Maine will be telling him to shut it. Richie, aptly, ignores this, and cups his hands, yelling in a Voice that just two years ago would've been a pathetic fusion of his own naturally obnoxious tone and an awful phlegmy accent that made him sound like a dying donkey (Beverly's observation, one particularly hot summer night in 1961, halfway through a cigarette as Rich droned on and on and on), but now sounds acutely like the Southern Aristocratic Belle he was always aiming for.

"Would'ja be a dawll and pass me one a' them brewskies, shugah' plum?"

Ben wrinkles his nose, tossing him the beer, and settling back down. "I think my boner just died, like, permanently," he announces, grimacing, and Eddie breaks out in a fit of laughs, snickering until his breath emerges as nothing more than shaky, hoarse coughs. Lithe fingers slip into his outermost jacket pocket and produce his aspirator, and he's still grinning like an idiot when he inhales a loud, gasping blast from the damn thing.

Richie waits cumbersomely for the thumbs up to signify that Eddie is All Good before proceeding as if Ben hadn't spoken at all.

"So what is this? Year seven?" He asks, fiddling with the bottlecap. It's a rhetorical question; the kids have all been counting days; hell, they've been counting hours since that hellish night, living in perpetual nightmarish apprehension, waiting trepidatiously for their time to run out, waiting for it to return. Rich grins grimly, screwing his eyes shut as he cracks open his beer with a barely audible fizz, craning his neck and standing up, as though intending to propose a toast.

He tips the bottle haphazardly, lopsided smile still dancing on his lips, and clears his throat.

"Well, here's to hopefully a good twenty more before we collectively kick the bucket!" He exclaims, beaming and taking a disconcertingly large gulp from his bottle.

The cheery declaration is interjected by six loud, dispelling groans, Eddie booing him reproachfully as Bill tosses clumps of snow at his face, Bev reaching up to whack his calves while Mike calls for him to "sit the fuck down!"

Stanley shakes his head ruefully, catches Bill's eye, and somberly mumbles, "worst New Years toast, ever," and Bill can't help but cackle into the night like a deranged hyena, propping himself up and brushing the murky snow from his front.

"I muh-missed you guys," his voice hiccups and he smiles gently, but no one comments on the stammer; just as Richie's loud, comfortably raucous habits return whenever he comes home from "the sunny west coasts, golden beaches, and cool cloudless skies of gorgeous California" (his Advertiser Voice, with a graceful boom and poise that the Real Richie would never be able to master), and Beverly swears sycophantically around her boys so much more than any lady ought to, and Stan keeps his eyes focused inanely at treetops and shrubbery, scouring for the fleeting flap of wings and jumping to identify their aviary owner, so does Big Bill's stutter sometimes make a sparse reappearance amidst their cozy conversations, for no regurgitant reason other than to remind them all that this Bill Denbrough is still infallibly their own Bill Denbrough: if not just the same as their belovedold Stuttering Bill, pretty damn similar.

And that, Ben decides, balefully observing his friend's bashful grin and smiling despite himself, is the greatest comfort of all.

"Guys!" Bev jumps up suddenly, enthusiastically shaking the snow from her hands and beaming, her hair flouncing up and licking at the darkness looming overhead like flickering flames. She gazes around at her friends, her friends, and ecstatically thrusts her arm forward to display the gold Rolex watch that clings to her bony wrist. "It's time."

And, sure enough, as the boys edge closer to take heed of her hand, the clock ticks tenaciously on, second-hand inching further and further away from the Roman numeral XII shimmering in gold at the top of its face.

They've been using her watch to do this since before they can remember.

(Well, not her watch, Beverly remedies idly, her mind's eye regressing to the sleek, shining trinket sitting on her father's desktop. She smiles slightly to herself and shakes her head. No, she thinks. Not hers.)

Richie's lips break apart into a smile so wide, it threatens to shatter his abnormally high, lilted cheekbones, and he takes the initiative, launching into Bill's lap and batting his eyelids up at him.

"This is it," he smirks, "thirty seconds left. Make an honest man outta me, Billy Boy."

Bill snorts and decisively shoves a fistful of filthy snow into his friend's face, and while Rich splutters and chokes on the ice, he glances towards Mike warmly.

"It's yuh-huh-hour turn, right?"

Mike nods, downs his remaining beer, and coughs. "Yup. Gimme your watch, Bevvie."

Dutifully, Beverly unlatches the clasp and buckle of the watch and slips the thing into Mike's open palm, turning then to smile at Stanley and stand, unprompted, where he pats down at the earth beside him.

"On your count, Mikey." She affirms, tugging Stan up with an exaggerated burlesque of strain, rolling her eyes when he murmurs indignantly in protest. 

Mike nods again, looking at the shuddering second hand circumventing the bold, brilliant sheen of the clock face once more.

"Fifteen seconds." He states, fixing his friends with a glower of quick encouragement.

Eddie scooches over, shifting wordlessly to where Ben still lies on his back, and turns toward Mike. He spares a glance around, noting that the others have all done the same.

"Ten," Mike announces with finality, and replaces the watch in his coat pocket as his friends join in, chanting.

"Nine."

Eddie's eyes catch Richie's, and Richie winks, and Eddie snickers, and they both silently thank their lucky stars that they exist, right here, right now, with nothing intruding to dispute their inherent themness.

"Eight."

Beverly glances at Ben, and they exchange an unspoken understanding, because everything has changed, and yet, Ben muses, watching her eyes gleam, watching her hair fan out around her pleasant face like an effervescent halo, yet nothing has changed at all.

"Seven."

Stan wraps a noodly arm around Bev's shoulder, and she nuzzles closer, and the biting cold no longer bites so harshly. Some sort of bird croons far, far away: too far for Stan to distinguish, too far for Stan to care.

"Six."

Richie's hair tickles the exposed part of Bill's bare hands, and Bill marvels at how soft it is, absently carding his fingers through the dark brown tufts. Some sort of bird croons far, far away, and Bill's eyes find Stan's, and he smiles.

"Five."

Mike sits down, and fights off a yawn, failing to ward away the smile that creeps over his cheeks as he watches Bill play with Richie's hair, watches Bev snuggle into Stan's torso, watches Eddie place an elbow on Ben's much less ample stomach. This, he thinks, beaming almost lunatically, this is how it was always meant to be.

"Four."

Beverly tugs her jacket tighter around her sinewy frame and lets her forehead fall onto Stanley's knobby shoulder, smiling when he pulls her even closer. She glances over at Richie, and smirks at the stupidly lovestruck look on his face.

"Three."

Richie raises a fond hand, and, although he'll later deny conceiving any semblance of sincerity or snappiness, pokes affectionately at the dimple that pops whenever Bill smiles, whenever he really smiles.

"Two."

Eddie's eyes catch the vehement flash of red that trails through the night sky as Stanley snatches off Bev's beanie and tugs it over his own soft hickory curls, watches her as she laughs at the stray wisps of his hair that stick out and cling to the wool. She used to be nearly the same height as Stan, Eddie remembers idly. Now, the top of her fiery head barely surpasses his shoulder.

"One."

Bill allows a quick scan of the familiarly forgotten surroundings before the clock officially strikes midnight, taking in the last fleeting moments of 1965. It's been a hell of a year: hectic, unrelenting, belligerently prognosticated as what Richie declared earlier to be "the longest fuckfest of twelve months the world has ever known!" It's been a pain in the ass, and a welcome refrain, and a pretty damn big milestone for the lot of them as their last 525,600 minutes as kids.

But now, Bill thinks, fingers still burrowed somewhere in Rich's disheveled locks, gaze falling flatly over banks of snow that are penetrated only by needlelike thickets of grass, now none of that matters at all. It doesn't really mean anything.

No, he shakes his head fondly, settling comfortably into the blanketing chill that's encompassed their little party of seven so securely for so so long; the years and the days and the hours and the minutes don't matter even a little bit. What matters is Ben, whose body is at least half the size of what it once was, but whose heart has only grown, so much so that he's been forced to free it from the box in which he'd been withholding it for so long: the box marked 'Property Of Beverly Marsh'. What matters is Stan, who has faded slits cleanly pressed up and down his wrists that he still believes no one has seen, that he convinces himself no one will ever see, who's currently wearing a big, lopsided grin that's ugly and crooked and makes his slightly oddly bent nose scrunch up and squash against faint smile lines, that shows all his teeth and stretches to meet his freckles, that's so un-neat and un-clean and un-Stan that Bill thinks it's the single most beautiful thing he's ever seen. What matters is Eddie, who's used the impotent aspirator tonight, but just the one time,(where Bill remembers his fingers once used to loiter apprehensively just above his pocket, they now curl comfortably atop their assumed spot on Ben's stomach) and if you squint, you can see the small indented splotch on his cheek where Richie kissed him earlier that he's neglected to wipe indignantly away, meaning that he's forgotten about it: a feat he once feared he'd never be able to accomplish. What matters is Bev, who's grown astoundingly into her beauty just like everyone always knew she would, but who will also remain "one of the guys" for as long as they're all alive, for as long as they're all still here, still partaking in this stupid New Years ritual they started when they were 12, still laughing and living and pretending it's all okay; pretending so well, that sometimes they forget they're pretending. What matters is Richie, whose glasses are askew, whose hair is disheveled, whose sparse freckles stand out conspicuously against his pale, flushed face, and who, for once in his damn life, seems serene, with an unobstructive smile tugging at his frostbitten lips, composed and restful and, as his eyes linger affectionately on the boy burrowed in the snow a couple feet away, finally at a loss for words. What matters is Mike, with his still-soft smile and his warm, kind eyes, Mike Hanlon, the only black kid in Derry, who owns this town, this town that once dared to stare down at him, to scoff at his feet; he now makes this stupid shitty city beg, grovel, and plead for the mercy it never showed them as kids.

What matters is them, and the fact that they're here, alive and thriving in spite of everyone and everything that ever said they couldn't. What matters is the living, breathing proof that they surpassed all the obstacles life intended to crush them in their tracks, that they fought and bit and punched their way through hell and came out the other end a little more broken and a little more complete. What matters is the familial glances, the soft, subtle touches and fleeting looks that assure them all that they will never ever grow up, not really. What matters is the knowledge that here, nonchalantly scattered among the sparse snowy hilltops on which they'd played as kids, here sit seven fully fledged members of the graduating class of 'Fuck Off, We Made It'.

What matters is that they are Losers. They always will be.

The clock strikes midnight, and Bill doesn't even realize he's grinning ("like an idiot," Ben will later inform him, "seriously, I genuinely thought you were high or something for a minute there") until Richie tugs him down by the collar of his shirt and kisses the smile right off his face.

It's been a while since he last kissed Richie, he muses idly for the briefest of moments before reciprocating the gesture. The first time he did it, the two were hardly toddlers, and Bill had just meticulously taped together his newest friend's glasses (which he'd managed to break for the third time that week) and, in lieu of thanks, Richie had planted a sloppy, chaste, buck-toothed smooch right on the other boy's lips (his justification being, "that's what my dad does whenever mama helps him out with something").

The second time (more aptly known as the time that actually counted, since they were thirteen then and somewhat more familiar with the scandalous implications of kissing), they had somehow managed to pass Mrs. Moore's ridiculous, obscenely impossible semester final, and, on a whim of sexually frustrated celebration, Bill had clasped his bony, sweaty hands around his friend's thin wrists and all but mashed their mouths together.

And now, the third occasion of purely platonic snogging between the two boys happened to occupy the first few seconds of 1966, with an observational Mike Hanlon sitting idly by, wondering silently while stifling an affectionate laugh whether there was any better way to start off the year.

Less than a yard away, Eddie Kaspbrak has flattened himself on top of Ben Hanscom in order to plant a lingering, closed-mouth kiss on his smiling lips. Ben clamps his hands on either side of Eddie's slender face and ponders momentarily what his girlfriend would think about him spending New Years kissing a boy who used to believe cooties were an airborne virus and exchanging saliva was the stupidest way of expressing your love for someone, because "why would you want to give somebody you care about all those germs?!"

The only two on their feet, Bev has to stand on tiptoe to reach Stan's mouth, brushing her lips against his with a moderate gentleness that no one but the six present have ever witnessed in her fiery, exuberant persona. Wrapping his arms around her narrow waist, Stan presses back, and the only girl he's ever kissed stretches gawky arms to steal back the beanie resting atop his head, laughing triumphantly when she succeeds in doing so.

She sets the hat back over her curls, and sticks her tongue out petulantly. Stan groans.

"God, way to ruin the moment, Bev."

She smirks at the pained expression on his face, and leans up to peck his lips once more.

"There was no moment, jackass. Don't pretend either of us got something out of that."

Stan shuts her up by wrapping his fingers around her gloved hands and tugging her into another solid, serendipitous kiss.

(It's certainly not the first time either of them has feigned normalcy for the sake of convenience, but it's decidedly the most refreshing instance of deceit they've had the pleasure of sharing.)

"And people say queer solidarity is dead," Stan hums to her slight, slanted jawline.

Bev chirps happily in agreement, and plants a smooch on the tip of his nose.

And Mike, God bless him, lies down in the snow and laughs up at the stars like an absolute freak, laughs at nothing and everything all at once, and wraps his arms around himself as his friends unlatch from each other to join him on the earth, one by one by one.

"Happy New Year," he mutters to himself, shutting his eyes and taking in the warm, all-consuming contentness that threatens to shatter his very grasp on reality with its inherent goodness.

He loves this part.

This part where Ben takes one of his hands in his own and Stan settles down with his head cushioned under Mike's arm. Where Bev props Mike's head up on her lap and runs her fingers absently through his hair. Where Eddie lays down across the lot of them to place his feet on Mike's stomach and his head on Richie's thighs, and Richie nestles his face into the crook of Bill's neck.

Where they sit like this, in a conglomeration of hopeless love and eternal adulation that few would be able to fully understand, for a couple of quiet, unintruded minutes as a new dawn rises somewhere along the horizon.

Where it's just them alone together with nothing but the whistling of the unfrozen water to interrupt their togetherness.

Where the world goes mute and muffled for just a few, precious seconds and all they have to do is exist.

Where forever finds its way into a silent, infinitesimal fraction of a moment and makes a home for itself there, among seven kids who love one another more than they've ever loved themselves, who know death so well, they live life in a way that very few souls are brave enough to try.

Somewhere, far away but not too distant to be known, a turtle swims in the pond off the banks of the quarry.

Bill smiles a smile that makes his dimple pop and his cheeks grow weary for the first time in forever.

He'd like to think that the turtle is smiling, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 2020 y’all!


End file.
